2015 in Mobile Games + 85 Links

Brace yourself, there are 85 hyperlinks in this post. They are all links to different games in the iTunes App Store.To understand how the market and audience is changing, I download and play a lot of mobile games. If you’re an iPhone user you may have noticed that the App Store is updated every Thursday at midnight PST with new featured apps. Each week there are a few dozen new apps curated by Apple itself, and a lot of fantastic games in particular are surfaced this way.
In February of 2015, I started creating monthly folders of these games to keep track of what’s released when, how it performs, and which games left an impression on me that month. This is a list of those apps, along with links to check them out for yourself. With few exceptions, these are all very high quality games.
Most of these are free to play games, meaning you can download and try them for free. If a game is really exceptional, it goes into the Play folder on my iPhone, so I have included a list of those here as well.
Why do this? To keep record of which games I played in 2015 on my iPhone and to make a point: the number of games available on mobile devices in this era is obscene. You could do nothing but play iPhone games all day for the rest of your life and you would not run out of games to play. You wouldn’t even come close.
For game developers – mobile game developers in particular – gaining and holding the attention of users is incredibly difficult. I will estimate that for the games below, I played each of them for an average of 5-10 minutes each. Investing a significant amount of time in one game is rare because there’s such a large volume of new games constantly coming into the pipeline.
I estimate that within a year of this date, in December of 2016, I will not remember most of these games. They will have vanished from my memory and have been replaced, likely by the even-larger wave of games coming in the new year. Is this sustainable? No, probably not. But the situation is outstanding for casual users interested in checking out new games.

February 2015

Duet: a charming rhythm game. Very simple but difficulty ramps up quickly.